


No Words Can Express

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Art, Art in Culture, Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Internal Conflict, Introspection, Mandalore, Mandalorian Culture, POV Female Character, POV Original Character, Satine doesn't look like a hero to anyone who wasn't a New Mandalorian, Teachers, Triggers, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 09:30:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15554736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: The life of an art/art history instructor in the Sundari Imperial Academy was not a life free of aggravation; this week, Roswitha Adani's biggest problem was textbook publishers' love affair with forced obsolescence. But a chance conversation with a student managed to unearth something else entirely, something that she would have preferred to remain buried. It was difficult to say, when the dust settled, just how many people's lives changed forever because of it.





	No Words Can Express

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : The awful background noise of living in a fascist state; xenophobia that in some cases has an analogue in real-life racism]

Sometimes, Roswitha Adani of It-isn’t-important-that-you-know-my-clan felt decidedly varying degrees of good fortune as regards to her current teaching assignment. There was no question that she was fortunate to have this position. It wasn’t every planet that could claim to host an Imperial Academy, and it wasn’t every Imperial Academy that could claim to host a well-appointed clutch of elective programs. Mandalore certainly merited both, but Roswitha could have been less fortunate in her placing. She could have been assigned to one of the smaller institutions away from the capital, or to one of the auxiliary Academies in the colonies. That she had instead been given a position at the Sundari Royal Academy was indeed fortunate. It was other things that made Roswitha question her good fortune.

Roswitha had been the only instructor teaching the art and art history courses at the Sundari Academy since its inception. It was not initially meant to be thus. Roswitha was _meant_ to be teaching only art history—which was more her forte than the practical course—and the department head had promised her over and over again that this wouldn’t be the state of affairs forever, but… Well. He _had_ been promising that from the beginning, and yet, no art instructor had materialized from the ether. The matter was all the more glaring for the fact that Roswitha was the _only_ instructor in the Academy asked to cover more than one course. She suspected they simply didn’t want to dedicate the sort of credits to payroll that a separate art professor would have commanded.

Of course, having to cover both classes might have been more of a burden had she had more students to teach from year to year. Roswitha could remember only one term since she had taken up her posting here in which both the art and art history classes had had more than fifteen students—the average number was closer to ten. Her classrooms tended to be sparsely populated, and tended to be populated by students who regarded them as a blow-off class, always a joy. Asides from the fact that if you’re in officer’s training, _no_ class is a blow-off class and poor marks will inevitably hurt you later, the students who refused to treat the subject matter seriously were always a trial.

Their attendance wasn’t appreciably different from the other students—absenteeism would have resulted in disciplinary action, which was undesirable even for this lot—but the quality of their work was infuriatingly slipshod. Homework was rarely turned in, and rarely turned in complete. In-class assignments and art projects were completed with such little care that Roswitha would have thought she was dealing with small children. Exams were passed by a knife’s edge.

And of _course_ , Roswitha had little leeway on how she weighed her class’s grades. Every Imperial Academy that offered art and/or art history courses had a standard weight system for their grades—that is to say, if Roswitha wanted to order the weights to her liking, she would have to seek an exception. The way grades were weighted in her classes, if a student passed the exams, they didn’t have to worry about anything else. If Roswitha had her way, she would have fixed things so that the exams carried scarcely any weight at all compared to the homework and in-class assignments that would attain primacy. But the powers in charge of determining how grades were weighted did not share her concerns, and thus, the lazy idiots who so dominated the landscape of her classrooms did the bare minimum with complete impunity.

Lazy students wasn’t the problem today, though. It wasn’t even the problem this _term_ ; this term’s batch of students was, while possessed of varying degrees of competence, uniformly diligent (Which covered up a multitude of sins). No. No, no, no. Today’s problem was the textbooks.

The textbooks were distributed to students on closed-circuit datapads (It wouldn’t do to allow the students access to the HoloNet through Academy datapads—they could use it to cheat, or accidentally infect the pad with a virus, or wind up viewing… _unapproved_ material). As was the case with textbooks for other courses, the approved art and art history textbooks were periodically updated, a situation that often finds you paying at a hundred credits or more for a book whose only differences from the earlier edition was a new introduction, or perhaps higher-quality illustrations; Roswitha couldn’t remember a new edition ever being substantially different from the edition that immediately preceded it. Nevertheless, if you were smart, you didn’t let your textbook get too far behind the current edition, for one very simple reason: the publishers believe in forced obsolescence, and the older your edition in comparison to the current, the glitchier it becomes.

Roswitha Adani had no discretion over purchase of the new edition of textbooks for her classes.

The most current edition of her art class’s textbook was Edition 15.

She had no discretion over whether to buy the new edition.

The edition her art class was currently using was Edition 10.

Well, the edition that three members of her nine-person art class were currently capable of using.

Roswitha resisted (barely) the urge to lower her head into her hands and _scream_ as six pairs of eyes stared at her in varying degrees of frustration and concern. “You’re _all_ getting the same error message?”

A few muttered words of assent, and one mumbled, “Yes, Instructor Adani.”

It was beneath her dignity to scream, or throw things. It was beneath her dignity to curse the Academy officials in charge of textbook spending to a slow, gruesome death in the deepest hell, no matter how they might deserve it. She was an instructor, a teacher to these cadets, and she would act like one.

“You, Kalna. Give me your pad.” Roswitha’s arm swung out, her finger pointing towards the unfortunate cadet like the gesture a heathen god proved fictional by the cleansing force of dispassionate science made before summoning a calamity to punish the iniquitous. At least, that was the way it must have appeared to Cadet Kalna, given the way they sat up ramrod straight and held their breath. For a long moment, Roswitha thought the cadet might have actually forgotten how to blink, because they stared at her with glassy eyes. It was strange to see that vision reflected in the cadet’s dark eyes, like wearing a shirt lined with sandpaper.

Then, very stiffly, Kalna handed her the datapad for instruction, and Roswitha did not see anything but herself reflected in their eyes, and the feeling passed.

With a bitten-back sigh of weary trepidation, Roswitha let her gaze fall on the screen of the datapad. It was a lightless black, save for a box in the middle of the screen that read, in descending order:

‘[Error 508] Page not responding.’

‘[Error 749] Product incompatible with operating system.’

‘We see that you are running an older edition of Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice by Reina Hayao. A more current edition is available. Would you like to update your product?’

Simple things, but they spelled disorder and confusion in her classroom until the problem could be fixed, so all in all, if the message had told her that the commandant would be here in five minutes to conduct an unscheduled inspection of her classroom and its goings-on, the message could hardly have been more unwelcome.

“And for those of you who can still access your textbook?”

“It’s… kind of sluggish?” one of them tried miserably. “Whenever you go to the next page, it just sort of stalls for a few seconds before it loads the next page.”

Screaming or throwing things would have been beneath her dignity, but Roswitha allowed herself to pinch the bridge of her nose between her thumb and her forefinger. _That_ wouldn’t make her look like a child lacking the self-control required not to shame their family by having a screaming fit in public—not that Roswitha had any family to shame. She spared a glance at the clock and grimaced. Though it made her feel unclean to say so, “And seeing as there is only ten minutes left on the clock, I don’t see any point in keeping you longer. Class dismissed.”

Roswitha bit her tongue mercilessly as she returned to the projector and her students began to file out; she could wait until the cadets were well out of earshot to start swearing. She drummed her fingers unsteadily against the back of the projector, grinding her teeth so hard her jaw ached.

Six students without working textbooks, and the other three soon to follow, if the pattern held true—and it was hardly as though patterns ever _didn’t_ , when it came to things that would inconvenience Roswitha Adani. Already the flimsi handouts she was going to have to make were dancing through her mind, jeering at her. But even that was trying to patch up a gaping stomach wound with your basic bacta bandage. It was early yet in the term, too early to subsist on handouts until final exams.

Come hell or high water, they needed new textbooks.

Roswitha was just becoming satisfied with the idea that she was alone, and free to foul the air as she saw fit, when a sound off behind her left shoulder silenced her. A high voice clearing its throat.

“Instructor Adani?”

No, definitely not alone. Profanity would have to head to the back of the queue, though it need not wait so long there as a good night’s sleep and the hope of a raise.

Roswitha turned, and immediately found herself looking down—not an uncommon occurrence with the cadets who hadn’t yet reached their full height (and not always uncommon with those who _had_ ), but this time, looking down a little more so than usual. A young, black-haired girl stared back at her.

“Cadet…” Why did something like this have to happen so early in the term? “…Wren, is it?”

“Cadet Sabine Wren, ma’am, yes. I wanted to ask you something, if that isn’t too much trouble.”

Sabine Wren, and perhaps actually a _Wren_ of Clan Wren, though Roswitha would admit she had her doubts about that. In the early days of the Imperial Academy, it had been the standard for the cadets to name themselves by clan names, wearing their blood allegiances for all to see. But at some point, Roswitha did not know when, and she wasn’t certain for what reason, that had shifted. Now, it was more common, much more common, for a cadet to be identified on the attendance roster by their family name, and in most cases Roswitha had long since given up trying to figure out which clan they came from.

Truth be told, Roswitha only wondered about Sabine Wren, here, because if she was a _Wren_ of Clan Wren, that would put her in close relation to Alrich Wren, and Alrich Wren was, well… Anyone connected with the world of contemporary Mandalorian art could hardly argue that Alrich Wren wasn’t _relevant_. She wouldn’t have been a blood relation, not unless she was his child, but it would still have been interesting.

But Roswitha doubted Sabine Wren was really a Wren of Clan Wren. She knew little of the Countess beyond rumors she wasn’t willing to credit, but she doubted Countess Ursa would have sent one of her close kin to Sundari under such circumstances. Some of the noble clans from the colonies could be a bit strange about… Well, they could be strange about a great many things. Prestige was one of them.

Wren by family or Wren by clan, the girl had certainly been raised on Krownest. Her Sundari Standard had a noticeable accent, one Roswitha had heard many times before, and whoever had taught her Sundari Standard had taught her the most stiffly formal form of it imaginable—

“Sabine?” came a hiss from the door. Another cadet—Onyo, Roswitha thought it might be—poked her head back inside the classroom. “Are you coming?”

“In a minute!” Wren hissed back. “Don’t rush me!”

—or maybe they had simply taught her to speak that way to authority figures. Roswitha wasn’t certain whether or not she should feel flattered. She probably shouldn’t. Compared to the likes of the commandant, or even the head of the fine arts department, Roswitha Adani was, well, the sort of person a cadet was most likely to take such a formal tone with if they were trying to butter them up.

With that in mind, Roswitha did not smile as she nodded to Wren. “Well, what was it you wanted to ask me? I haven’t all day, and neither do you, I’d wager.”

Wren’s brow furrowed slightly. She reached into her pack and pulled out a datapad.

Did Roswitha really have to go through the matter of malfunctioning textbooks again? Students who made it to Sundari Academy were supposed to be _intelligent_ , or at least attentive enough to pay attention to their instructors when they established—or, at least, _clearly implied_ —that there was nothing to be done if the textbooks were so outdated that even the datapads they’d been reading them from wouldn’t support them anymore.

It wasn’t a school datapad, though, and certainly not the datapad she had issued to Wren on the first day of class. As Roswitha watched Wren tap the display screen, she couldn’t help but notice that the pad was smaller and sleeker than your typical Academy datapad. She opened her mouth to chastise the cadet for bringing a personal datapad into the classroom, but suddenly Wren turned the pad for her to look at, and the image that greeted Roswitha’s eyes stopped her breath in her throat.

“I wanted to ask you,” Wren said, worrying slightly at her lower lip, “about this painting.”

It… had been some time since Roswitha had last felt her throat close the way it did when she looked at the flames, the furnace, the sullen crowd stripped naked and the screaming armor burning to ash. Like the last time she had tried to eat something with chando peppers in it, that thick, prickly burning before her vision began to swim and her throat began to swell. “What was your question?” Her voice scarcely sounded as though it belonged to her, but it was something of an accomplishment that she could speak at all.

“This was in reference to something that happened after the Duchess Satine took power—it must have been very soon afterwards—but I can’t find out what that was.” The frustration-lines in Wren’s forehead, angry and slightly puckered, reappeared and deepened. “None of the Academy history books cover that period in great detail.”

Easy it would have been to speak of wounds too fresh to be trod upon, and easy it would have been for Roswitha to tell Wren that Satine Kryze had been the great betrayer of their people, a puppet of the corrupt Republic and the treacherous Jedi, and that that was all that Wren really needed to know. But Roswitha’s throat snapped shut like an animal trap around “betrayer,” and in Wren’s amber eyes she could see a knife-like gleam. As a knife is drawn to rend flesh, so is a keen mind drawn to rend the veils of ignorance, wherever they might hang. (And strangely, it did not occur to Roswitha to simply refuse to answer the question, and send an inquisitive cadet on her way. Her sense of authority seemed to have failed her.)

“That isn’t a metaphor, Cadet Wren.” When the girl let her eyes fall towards the contents of the furnace, locked in a still, silent scream, eyebrow raised, Roswitha amended, “It isn’t meant to be a metaphor by very much. No parents to tell you this tale?”

“I have parents.” The words dropped like a heavy stone onto the desert ground. “They do not speak much of this time.”

Truth be told, Roswitha knew few, civilian or warrior or once-warrior-with-no-fight-left-in-them, who particularly liked to speak of the time just after Satine Kryze solidified her rule of Mandalore and all its colony worlds. Some of her staunchest supporters yet lived, but there were few left of them now, and they had enough care for their necks to keep their mouths shut. For everyone but Satine and the most devoted of her following, it had been a defeat bitter beyond the words needed to express it succinctly, or in ways that a child could consciously understand, beyond the pangs of thwarted longing and the terror of being heard to speak a dialect of Mando’a regarded as ‘suspect.’ Perhaps if Roswitha had been allowed to fill up all the pages of a book…

But she didn’t have that kind of time.

“You know, at least, that after Duchess Satine took power, she exiled all warriors from Mandalore, never to return.”

“Yes,” Wren said stoutly. “I was born in exile.”

She would have been one of the last, then, given how young she seemed to be. “Do you know what happened just before she sent the warriors into exile?”

Wren blinked. Her eyes flicked to the screen of the datapad, held out between them like a shield or a barricade or a bridge. “I… I suppose it’s represented here, somehow.”

Roswitha smiled thinly, sickly. “Few speak of it. Few care to remember it. When the Duchess Satine solidified her rule, she decided to “clean house,” as it were.” To the crawling dread of everyone who had simply hoped to live with their heads down, as inappropriate as that might be considered for Mandalorian warriors. “It was a new day for Mandalore, she said, and she was instituting a new order for a new day.

“When the Duchess Satine solidified her rule, she summoned the warriors of Mandalore to her side, and took them out into the desert outside of Sundari.” The thing about beskar, especially full suits of armor made of beskar, was that while it could be insulated to help keep out the cold, it didn’t do much to keep out the heat. Out in the desert, the dry, hot desert where the only thing to stop the wind was the much-reduced mountains and the glittering, heat-radiating domes, stay out there for just a few minutes and you’ll start to feel sweat dribbling down the back of your neck, feel the dust somehow sneak in through the seals in your helmet and clog in your mouth, turning your voice to the desert’s voice, a dry croak of wind that can’t be coaxed into a scream.

“There, in the desert, there was an incinerator of incredible height and girth, large enough that a hundred people could have walked inside. Satine stood before it and said to us, ‘You have sworn fealty to me. You have claimed that you are loyal to me. If you are truly loyal, you will strip off your armor and throw it into the fire. If you do not do this, there is no inch of ground on Mandalore where you will be welcome. You will be exiles, and you will be Mandalorians no longer.”

Something the painting captured very well: the sky had not been a pure, unblemished blue. It shimmered silver with heat and was tinted brown with clouds of dust that swirled ever on and on. It was hard and flat, something like stale water, something like the cold realization that you were standing on the edge of a cliff, and the ground behind you was crumbling. It was a dull color, a color Roswitha associated so utterly with defeat that even so many years later, whenever she saw it, defeat crawled into her gut and clawed at her intestines until she felt as though she might vomit.

Wren said uncertainly, “Duchess Satine isn’t in this painting.”

“Does she deserve to be?” Roswitha asked quietly. Just as quietly, if a little choked, "She is represented by the furnace, at any rate. It is her agent."

Wren’s eyes flicked from the datapad to Roswitha’s face, and back to Roswitha. The clock ticked in the background. There came a faint murmuring of voices outside as the nearest class let out for the day. Wren opened her mouth as if to say something, but she shut it again as if thinking better of it, and did not speak again for a while.

When Wren lifted her voice into speech again, “Do you know who painted this, Instructor Adani? It’s supposed to be an anonymous work, and I’ve never been able to match it to the work of any of the other painters active when it was first revealed,” was hardly any less arresting than the sight of the painting itself.

 _That’s two topics, and you intimated that you’d only speak of one_ foamed into life in Roswitha’s mind. Still, she did not remember her sense of authority, and said, rusty and mechanical before finding some level of ease, “Determining the identity of anonymous artists was never a preoccupation of _mine_. Certain of my colleagues in the world of art critique might chase after leads, but I preferred to deal with the actual content of the art. If the artist chose to remain anonymous, that was to their loss or their profit, depending on what I thought of the piece, that was their problem. Not mine.”

It was a controversial piece for a controversial time, but then, Roswitha could not remember a time that hadn’t been “controversial.” She’d never known life in Mandalorian space to be anything but politically fraught. She rather suspected the only reason Satine hadn’t banned it was because her attention had been focused on other things.

“Do you have any _other_ questions, Wren?”

Roswitha got the impression that Wren might take the issue of authorship a bit more seriously than was advisable—her face had a certain thwarted cast—but she at least was able to let this go long enough to nod. “The style…” And here, she was oddly hesitant. “…It doesn’t really match with the styles that most other artists used during that time. It’s definitely not Navanist—“

“The correct term to use is Mandalorian cubism.”

Those lines wore their way back into Wren’s forehead, this time caught between frustration and apparent uncertainty. “It’s not Exilic, either—“

“I think you’ll find the _textbook_ refers to that style as Mandalorian Nouveau.”

It would be impossible, at this stage, to mistake what flashed over Wren’s face like the shimmering of light upon boiling water as anything but irritation. The bite of it sharpened her voice to a keen edge, though it managed not to get so far as altering the _words_. “It doesn’t match the Sundari masters, and it doesn’t match the most famous Exilic masters, either.”

And there was that sick smile curdling on Roswitha’s lips again, as the taste of something sour rose in the back of her throat. “I suspect the painter found both a bit too fanciful to properly capture the horror of the moment.”

-0-0-0-

Never had Roswitha had much in the way of trouble approaching the head of the fine arts department. Arnfried Haxan was a small, balding man whose every edge and line was rounded. The water-soft glimmer in his pale blue eyes was at times almost bovine, and even on occasions that found him roused to anger, you could never honestly say that they looked hard. He gave the impression of a bit of sharp glass that had tossed and tossed in the sea (on some other planet, by necessity of Mandalore having no extant seas) until it was soft and smooth and couldn’t cut you even if you pressed its edge to your skin. The door to his office was always open, and provided another visitor wasn’t already sitting in one of the chairs across from his desk, you were always welcome.

They weren’t exactly friends. But Roswitha thought of him as someone she could talk to, and that was infinitely more valuable.

A pity he couldn’t always be made to see sense.

“Arnfried, my situation is untenable. I can’t just make handouts for the rest of the term; my students need actual books to read from.”

“I’ll call for a tech to look at the datapads, Roswitha,” Arnfried assured her. “They’ll be back in working order by the end of the week.”

“For how long?” Roswitha asked sharply, and when Arnfried wouldn’t meet her gaze, she let out a hot little puff of breath. “Arnfried. I know the wheels of bureaucracy move at a sometimes glacial pace. Stars, do I know how slowly those wheels turn. But this has become utterly ridiculous. How many years has it been since my art class last received new textbooks? Five? Six? Even when we were receiving new ones on a reasonable basis, they were always at least two editions behind the most current; now, they’re five. They’re five editions behind, Arnfried. They’re obsolete and all the tinkering with datapads in the galaxy won’t change that!”

She was halfway out of the chair and didn’t realize until Arnfried’s hands shot up, half-shield and half-supplication, and Roswitha noticed for the first time that she was looking down on Arnfried from a greater distance than usual. Slowly, muscles loath to work, she sat heavily back down. The squashy, over-stuffed cushions with their loud, slippery faux-leather casings, were entirely too yielding, and she sank down into them without the hard impact that would have let her temper be jarred, just a little.

“Please try to understand, Roswitha.” His smile was so soft that Roswitha couldn’t tell where the curving of his lips was supposed to begin. “We haven’t forgotten you, but you aren’t the only one in the fine arts department who’s having problems. My photography class needs new supplies as well, and you already know about Arata’s difficulties.”

“How many students is he down to this term?” dragged itself from Roswitha’s lips.

“Two. It hasn’t been decided for sure as of yet—I’d rather you not repeat it outside this office—but his position will likely be eliminated after this term. They’ve been looking over the budget, and they can’t justify keeping a faculty member with so few students to teach.”

Roswitha winced internally; she felt rather old, all of a sudden. Arata had been brought on at the same time as her, to serve as the instructor for the strings section of the orchestra. He was the only non-human instructor left at the Sundari Academy; the rest had left years ago. And once upon a time, there had been plenty of non-human _students_ in the Academy as well; Sundari, which had been so dominated by a human population, had seen aliens start to return after Satine was ousted and the chaos of the Siege subsided. But slowly, Roswitha did not know when it had begun, but slowly and surely, the non-human population of Sundari began to thin, and non-human students in the Academy began to be more difficult to spot. Attitudes towards non-humans began to cool, and Arata often found himself short of both students to teach and the proper equipment he needed to teach them.

She rather suspected that, human though she might be, with the last non-human ancestor a Mirialan (so how much did it even count?) some ten generations back ( _really_ , how much did it count?), she might wind up in the same life pod before too long. Especially if this thing with the textbooks kept on the way it had been.

“And, Roswitha?” Roswitha was reluctantly drawn back to the land of the present by Arnfried’s apologetic grimace. “Speaking of budgets, and low classroom attendance…”

Wherever this conversation was going, it was going to give her a migraine. Roswitha knew that; that little grimace of Arnfried’s, accompanied by a delicate flutter of his Adam’s apple, was always the herald of a conversational turn that was heading straight towards the street of Migraine. She gritted her teeth and asked, “What is it?” After all, the sooner she asked, the sooner she had an answer. The sooner the migraine began, the sooner it would end (At least, that was how it was _supposed_ to work).

“They—“ it struck Roswitha that they always used the term ‘they,’ never naming the people referred to by ‘they,’ but she didn’t comment as Arnfried went on “—are looking to expand the weapons training program, and the money has to come from somewhere. Given the general decline in registration to our classes, the budget for the fine arts program will likely be slashed starting with the next fiscal year. Roswitha… I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. But along with Arata’s class, they have been eyeing yours…”

Roswitha listened woodenly as Arnfried launched into a rambling, disjointed spiel about all the options that would be granted priority over simply eliminating her classes and eliminating her. It was possible that art and art history would be combined, or that art would be eliminated, and art history kept on (“If it comes down to choosing one or the other to stay, they’ll probably eliminate art; the art supplies for your class isn’t _free_ , after all”), and at the idea that the art class might be eliminated, Roswitha felt the most absurd pang of loss, considering that earlier that day she had been musing to herself that art history was more her forte than the practical course.

Other options were floated, all of them roughly as palatable as an already rather sandy-tasting ration bar left to spoil for a decade or so. Art and art history could both be kept open, but only made available to the cadets undergoing officer’s training. One class could be made available for one semester of the year, and the other for the other. Students could pay an extra fee to attend art class, the better to cover the cost of art supplies (“And you don’t think this would _depress_ attendance?” “It won’t be _my_ decision, Roswitha; it will be _theirs_.”). Roswitha could undergo extra training—on her own time and with her own credits, of _course_ —to learn how to perform other functions in the Academy as well, something that would really make her indispensable.

“Well,” Arnfried said when he was done, eyeing her with a frankly impossible mixture of optimism and pessimism, “what do you think of it?”

Roswitha’s mouth contorted bitterly. “No.” None of them bore a diplomatic response. “No to all of it. None of those options make the situation better.”

Arnfried massaged his forehead, letting out a sigh that seemed to deflate him, ever so slightly, like someone letting the slightest bit of air out of a balloon before tying it up again. “And yet you will be forced to make do with one of them, nonetheless. I promise you, Roswitha, I’ll do everything I can to keep your position, err, positions from being eliminated. But the truth of the matter is that art isn’t as appealing to the people as it used to be. Especially not to the young.”

Now _that_ was going too far. A surge of anger shot through Roswitha’s body, filling her with the kind of prickling, shifting energy you didn’t normally experience without ingesting copious amounts of giggledust. But Arnfried was looking at her with such knowing eyes, and the anger began to filter out of Roswitha’s mind just long enough for _questions_ to take its place. Questions like ‘When was the last time a new art gallery opened?’, ‘When was the last time the unveiling of a master’s latest work made the news?’, ‘When was the last time the art museum had a new exhibit?’, ‘When was the last time the art museum’s walls weren’t full of gaps where paintings ought to be, and the pedestals for sculptures and pottery were all full?’

She didn’t know. She couldn’t answer any of them.

The thing about that prickling, shifting energy ingesting copious amounts of giggledust would grant you, was that once the high began to ebb, you didn’t feel energized anymore—you just felt jittery. And sick. Roswitha mumbled her excuses and left, her breath coming out in short, shallow gasps.

-0-0-0-

Roswitha had lived in Sundari for many, many years, and she had seen it in many, many different casts. She hated it as only a local could—loud as you’d expect for a massive city nestled under a metal dome, crowded as you’d expect for a city that enjoyed no practical way to expand, dirty and wounded and decayed in places as you’d expect for an ancient place that had violently changed hands so many times. She loved it as only a local could, loved the secret places you needed to have lived there your whole life to know about, loved the streets and plazas and teeming marketplaces, loved the dull pulsing of its ancient heart. It was home.

(It had been many, many years since Roswitha had stepped outside the dome. She no longer remembered the feeling of wind on her face as anything but the faintest of mirage-like suggestion, tugging feebly upon memory. No longer etched upon memory was the light of the sun; the harsh, fluorescent lights of street lamps and shop signs and ceiling fixtures had taken their place, pools of light lapped by seas of gray shadow. She had forgotten the darkness of a night pocked with stars and the glistening lamp of Concordia. Night to Roswitha Adani was the hazy blue of a world where the street lamps had been extinguished and the variegated sea of shop signs were left to glint and glimmer in the night, or it was the too-dense darkness of the blackout, punctuated by the deep, rolling of a klaxon and the staccato rumbling of artillery. Nature was far removed from Roswitha’s daily reality.)

It had never really occurred to her that Sundari, that city that she loved and loathed in equal measure, might not share all of her interests, or might not share them forever and a day. But as she walked home from the Academy (she was a civilian instructor, after all, and civilian instructors had to find their own accommodations, rather than relying on the Academy to supply them), across bridge and terrace and crowded street, she began to look, to really look and see.

Of course, it wasn’t all as it had been from her earliest memories of life in this city. Many landmarks she’d held dear to her heart had been destroyed during the Siege. The memorial shrine in Peace Park had been blasted to dust, and the mural at the base of the royal palace had met hardly any kinder a fate—its face was gouged so deep that it was no longer possible for the untrained to tell where the sculptor’s chisel had struck the stone, and where blaster fire had struck it instead. That was what war did to a city—it altered the landscape, wounded the foundations, and no amount of plaster could hide the fact that some things were now absent.

But though there was not a single district of Sundari that Roswitha could honestly say had weathered the Siege _unscathed_ , there were some that had not suffered so greatly as others. Her walk home wasn’t as long as it could have been, but it wasn’t a short walk, either, and she kept her eyes on her surroundings as she walked.

Public art in the form of wall paintings and murals and sculptures and the occasional mosaic were, traditionally, found all over Sundari. Roswitha would leave to anthropologists the explanation for the Mandalorians’ particular liking for such art. Her personal belief, however wrong or right it might be, was that since Mandalore had little left in the way of natural beauty, its people had decided to provide what nature no longer could. Once upon a time, you could not go a single month without seeing something new on the way to or from work—a new painting, even something only a meter square, or a new sculpture that someone had just decided to put out on a pedestal and everyone else had decided to walk around instead of remove.

Roswitha… You see, the thing is, Roswitha couldn’t actually remember the last time she had looked _up_ as she walked to or from work. She licked her lips as she surveyed the dusky (the street lamps were set to a dim orange that made the streets seem almost misty, though the air was as bone-dry as it ever was) street on either side of her, uncertain as to whether embarrassment at inattention or alarm at _changes_ should be what ruled her now.

The streets were… grayer, than she remembered. Grayer, and starker, and plainer, and duller. Six years ago she had stood at a street corner and admired a new wall painting that had appeared during the (lamp-lit) night, of a sleek Kom’rk-class fighter upon the backdrop of a starry sky. It was gone, and the wall was painted a washed-out, patchy gray. Lining the wall at waist-height for an adult man, up an exterior stairwell on an apartment building, there had been a tesserae mosaic of blue and gold and green waves, one on top of the other. The porcelain stones had been ripped out of the duracrete wall, and Roswitha found no trace of them but one broken shard of porcelain, a sad gleam of green against a dull street.

There was nothing to replace what had been taken away. Just gray paint to cover up where a symphony or a cacophony (depending on Roswitha’s opinion of the piece) had been, blank walls with no life and no soul.

 _It is the price we pay for the freedom to be strong again_ , Roswitha thought gloomily. _It is the price we pay to be able to speak whatever dialect of Mando’a we wish in the streets without fearing a knock on the door later. It is the price we pay for a greater yet freedom of expression._ It wasn’t as consoling as it should have been.

Roswitha stopped at her favorite food stall on the way home, and at least there, as she ate her supper of a pickled egg and a bun the size of her fist filled with yot bean paste, she could find some color to soothe the sudden ache that had come upon her. The glass jars in the back of the stall, irregular in size and shape (some rounded, some square, one long and thin and swirling gently in a wave pattern) sparkled under the golden lamp on the ceiling of the stall that swung gently whenever the cook moved around. Eggs, chando peppers, and shuura floated in neon-green, electric-blue, and soft, grainy pink pickling solutions. Jogan fruits were suspended in purple syrup, cloudberries and starberries in glittering honey. Sometimes, Roswitha fancied she was looking at paint, until reality sank back in and she took the fact that she hadn’t been admitted to the nearest hospital for poisoning as proof that what was contained in those jars was safe for human consumption.

As ever, the apartment was dark and quiet when she entered it. Even when Roswitha turned on the lights to illuminate her little living room and kitchen, it seemed a little dim, a little muted. It didn’t feel like home, not exactly. The apartment building she had been living in during the Siege had been bombed, and few of her possessions could be salvaged from the rubble. Even fewer of them had stayed in her grip through her stay in the shelter she’d lived in until the Siege finally lifted—Roswitha still wondered bitterly sometimes if the little thief who’d made off with her centuries-old sculpture of Liane Viszla had even grasped the true value of what she had taken. The place just felt like somewhere she slept. Somewhere she ate. Somewhere she woke up in the middle of the night, groping for a blaster (old habits die hard), if she heard a ‘thump.’ Not home.

Nevertheless, it was the place Roswitha went when her business was done, so she called it home when she was asked.

As she sat down in her armchair, images of vanished art flashed through Roswitha’s mind, and a piece of art that would never, _ever_ go away burned behind her eyelids.

Roswitha blinked, the motion feeling as if it had the weight of a mountain shifting behind it. She had seen that painting as many times as she wished to, and had once sworn she would never look at it again. It wasn’t spoken of much in the art world, something leerily stared at out of the corner of your eyes. It cut too close to the skin for anyone’s comfort, too close to the marrow to bear the sort of lavish analysis that other acclaimed works might receive. Analyses of this particular work tended to be little more than a blurb.

But you could still find it if you searched for it on the HoloNet.

Roswitha picked up her personal datapad (not as sleek or as new as Wren’s, but she got by), typed in a search phrase, and there she was, looking at it. None of the naked crowd who’d abandoned their armor to burn faced a potential audience, so there was no danger of eye contact. That was the only comfort, the only anchor she had, as she scrolled down a little, to read what information this particular article might have.

She raised an eyebrow, the churning in her stomach subsiding a little as she looked over the long, _long_ list of titles given to the painting catalogued by this particular article.

‘Untitled’ by Anonymous artist, the official designation.

‘The Price of Apostasy.’

‘The Faint of Heart Taste Death a Thousand Times.’

‘The Day Honor Failed.’

‘Death of a Culture.’

There were yet more, a list that seemed to stretch into infinity. She… hadn’t been aware the painting had acquired so many different titles. She hadn’t been paying it any mind.

But none of them fit. Roswitha’s body ached for some liquor to soothe her troubled mind; thwarted (it _was_ a school night, after all), she tapped her fingernail against the screen of her datapad, heaving a heavy sigh. None of those titles fit. None of them captured the horror of what was happening in that _very moment_. How could anything capture that?

-0-0-0-

Time dragged on as it ever did: with much kicking and screaming, and the occasional bite to the hand that dragged it. (Roswitha had never known Time to be gracious.) Arnfried was true to his word—a tech showed up to look at her art students’ textbooks, and after much swearing and a surreptitious sip from a hidden flask, managed to get them working again. For about a week, at which point they promptly broke down again, all nine of them this time. The breakdown of the art textbooks and the visit of the increasingly exasperated technician became a weekly occurrence, and Roswitha began to doubt seriously whether any of her students were actually going to pass the class, no matter how diligent they might be. Oh, that would certainly look like a reason not to fire her to the people who were currently mulling over the art and art history classes’ fates.

It was impossible to murder an inanimate object. Roswitha kept reminding herself of that fact every time someone’s datapad started reading those by now entirely too familiar error messages. It was impossible to murder an inanimate object, and even if she picked up the nearest datapad, flung it against the wall, and stomped on it until it was reduced to shards of glass and plastic beneath her foot, it wouldn’t be the same as murder. It wouldn’t be as _satisfying_ as if she had killed something alive.

Besides which, it would have been beneath her dignity to do such a thing.

Sabine Wren was catching Roswitha’s attention more and more. Not in art history, mind you. Wren (who, along with Onyo, was the only cadet this term who was taking both classes) was in art history your typically diligent, if quiet, student. She took notes and did her readings; she turned in all of her homework and assignments on time, and if they seemed to have been written with a bit more zeal than Roswitha was accustomed to, she did occasionally get students who were like that. The nearly-incandescent glow in Wren’s eyes was the only hint in art history of what Roswitha saw from her in art.

Wren wasn’t quiet in art class. She wasn’t a _loud_ student, wasn’t a chronic interrupter like certain other cadets Roswitha had had to deal with. What she was was opinionated, and whereas in art history Wren was content to soak up the material like a sponge, here, she engaged with it.

Wren had Opinions, and yes, they were very much the sort of opinions that warranted capitalization—the forcefulness (if couched in the stiffly formal form of Sundari Standard the girl was wont to use when addressing her) of the way her views were expressed demanded nothing less.  And those Opinions weren’t complaints about the workload, or the assignments she was being set, no. Not only would those opinions not have warranted capitalization, Roswitha would not have remembered them later, except as a dull ache behind her eyes as she had to explain for the umpteenth time why she wasn’t changing the syllabus just because one student thought they were too good for the work they were being set. They wouldn’t have had the power to engrave themselves so indelibly upon her memory.

Wren had Opinions about contour and layering, about the use of light and shadow in two-dimensional art and ways in which the absence of shadow could sometimes be used to achieve an especially stark effect, if utilized properly. She had Opinions about the use of color, about appropriate color symbolism for a certain work, the ways color symbolism could be deliberately bucked to achieve a greater impact, opinions about which colors went together and which didn’t, about which breaks in accepted color compatibility were acceptable under what circumstances. She had Opinions about archetypes and symbolic objects and the use of negative space. For everything under the artistic sun, Sabine Wren had an Opinion.

Roswitha would bet a year’s salary the rest of the class thought that the two of them hated each other. There was nothing quite like a “discussion” between Instructor Adani and Cadet Wren to derail the session, especially considering that neither of them were at all eager to either concede to the other, or to cease talking and move on with the lesson of the day. And yes, Roswitha would admit that sometimes their “discussions” got a bit heated—when you felt passionately about something, that was sometimes inevitable. But it had been a long _, long_ time since Roswitha had had the chance to have a discussion like this with anyone, and if she had to have it with a student (and a young one, at that), then so be it.

For all that Wren wasn’t very old (Roswitha wasn’t certain of her actual age, but to look at her would have put her at somewhere between eleven and thirteen), she was very articulate when she expressed her Opinions. In many cases she gave an impression of having been long immersed in art technique (maybe she was more closely related to Alrich Wren than Roswitha had thought), someone immersed enough to actually have informed opinions. And in cases where she didn’t give quite that impression, she still spoke on the matter with great force and interest, more animatedly than Roswitha had heard from a student (or from anyone, for that matter) in a long time.

It was getting to the point where Roswitha suspected she might have been giving Wren a bit more leeway on her assignments and in-class projects than she did the other students. It was such a pleasure to deal with someone who actually had educated opinions about things that she was willing to tolerate an answer to a short-answer question that wasn’t quite what the rubric said it should be, and the rubrics for hands-on assignments had always been rather fluid, anyways.

It just… she felt a little like she did before the Siege… No, before the Clone Wars, before the food shortages and the protests and the attacks and the faint whiff of unrest in the air had turned into a choking miasma. When she could meet for drinks with a few fellow art critics (some of whom were even her _friends_ ; so many of them had died during the Siege that she could scarcely remember now what it was like to have so many friends) and discuss the latest uproar in the art world. It felt like having someone to argue with over a painter’s use of chiaroscuro or the sculptor’s use of gilding. Like arguing over whether vitralistic paintings were better to look at than stained glass. It was like so many things.

(Dimly, it occurred to Roswitha that she barely knew the girl outside of her opinion on artistic techniques. She did not know what made Wren’s heart burn when she was not in this classroom, when her mind wasn’t on art. She didn’t know why that would be dangerous, and didn’t care to learn. It didn’t matter, anyways—the number of students she had ever seen again after they graduated amounted to a grand total of zero. It didn’t matter how much or how little she knew about this one, regardless of their shared interest.)

Roswitha paid a lot of attention to Wren when she was in her classroom; rarely would a full ten minutes pass that didn’t see her eyes drawn to Wren’s form. It was interesting to see what someone so engrossed might do, what she might say, what she might paint or draw. Her eyes were often on Wren, so when she saw what looked more like an engineering drawing at Wren’s station during free time, Roswitha could not help but take notice.

Wren wasn’t as cognizant of Roswitha’s presence as the other way around, and did not look up from her seat as she scribbled mindlessly on a sheet of artist’s paper, occasionally stealing glances at the engineering drawing with a heavily furrowed brow. Roswitha was no engineer, and she’d never been able to make heads or tails of such schematics. There was a reason her career had been one of an art critic and an art/art history instructor, and not an engineer; for one thing, math wasn’t her strong suit. But whatever it was, it looked almost as though it was meant to harvest energy—or disseminate it.

And she saw the engineering drawing, in varying stages of… Completeness likely wasn’t the right word for it. Roswitha had seen the engineering drawing in varying stages of revision, on multiple occasions. Every time she saw it, her curiosity grew, though she managed to hold her tongue for what she thought was an inordinately long time. Wren was her student, not her friend; it didn’t pay to pry into things. But eventually, her resolve to remain silent had to crack.

As best as Roswitha could tell, art was Wren’s last class of the day on the days that she took it; certainly, the fact that she wasn’t racing out the door with the rest of the students (to be fair, Onyo occasionally stuck around until Wren was finished packing her things away) suggested that there wasn’t anywhere she needed to be anytime soon. She packed away the art supplies she kept in a cubby at the back of the room with everyone else’s (And Roswitha wished with all her heart that more of those cubbies were full than they were; if they were, maybe she wouldn’t be worrying about whether she’d even still have a job after the end of the term). She packed away the art supplies she’d acquired on her own into her bag, then the datapad with her (still-malfunctioning, just like the rest of the class’s) textbook, then the folder with the engineering drawing and whatever flimsi worksheets she happened to have on her at the time. Everything had to go in there in a specific order; she never deviated from it.

One day, as Wren was carefully packing her things away and she and Roswitha were the only people left in the classroom, curiosity overcame Roswitha at least. “Wren, what is that… I suppose it’s some sort of engineering drawing, that you have out sometimes at your station? I can’t make heads or tails of it?”

Curiosity was hardly slaked by Wren’s immediate reaction, the way her back stiffened and her eyes grew brightly watchful. A few strands of black hair were loose from the knob they were tied into (dress code regulation); they brushed across her cheek as she stared up into her instructor’s face.

“You’re… I’m not really supposed to have that out, ma’am.” She didn’t sound frightened, not really—no taut thrum in her voice like you’d expect of someone who’d been caught out breaking a rule and now feared punishment. She didn’t even sound all that tense. Just the faint, crooked embarrassment of someone too-engrossed in a project, and hadn’t realized just how deep the hole of absorption went until now.

“Well, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” Curiosity was making her lax, Roswitha mused ruefully, to speak thusly to a student who had revealed what Wren had. Clearly, she needed a bit more excitement in her life— _positive_ excitement, not the kind of excitement engendered by malfunctioning, obsolete textbooks and the prospect of having to teach in severely reduced circumstances come next term.

Wren blinked, seemingly thrown by that. “It’s… a project. I’m not allowed to tell you very much about it.” She worried at her lip, eyes narrowing slightly. “When it’s finished, I should be able to show you, but not until then.”

And that, Roswitha knew, would be the end of that. She’d known enough artists who were extraordinarily territorial about their unfinished works that it had been a long time indeed since Roswitha had pressed on such a matter. Wren was an artist, and even if that engineering drawing she kept looking at wasn’t art, some things just bled together.

Bled...

Roswitha frowned.

Interesting choice of word.

“Instructor Adani?”

“Yes?” Roswitha murmured abstractedly.

“I asked my parents about that painting.” _That_ got Roswitha’s attention, her stomach clenching ever so slightly. No need to ask which painting Wren was referring to. “I wanted to know more about it, and I thought they might know something.”

It was easy enough to feign composure. Roswitha wasn’t a young woman, and she hadn’t lived her life in placid, unchallenging times; she had had plenty of practice pretending at being calmer than she actually was. “And what did you learn?”

She watched, slightly entranced, as something happened to Wren’s face that she had never seen there before. Slowly, a thin sneer unfurled over Wren’s mouth, her eyes narrowing to slits. “The artist got one thing very right. People who don’t appreciate the weight of their vows…” She trailed off, but she hardly needed to. The look on her face said it all. It was the look Roswitha had seen a thousand times before.

“We should always keep our vows,” Roswitha said woodenly, and looked away. “Those who don’t are worth nothing.”

-0-0-0-

Roswitha remembered little of the rest of their conversation. She remembered more clearly what came some weeks later, when the whispered reports of just what Sabine Wren had built and what use it had been put to came to her. Wren appeared in her class twice after the initial report, a silent, staring ghost of herself, and then she was gone. Onyo vanished with her. Their classroom made the departure feel like a tomb.

-0-0-0-

Her wrist aches from exertion; her wrist is always aching, and the pain spreads to her elbow, her shoulder, her back. Pain like knives sinking into flesh, pain like the lancing fire of a disruptor set on the lowest setting, pain like dying. She looks down at her hands and finds her flesh as putrid and corrupt as the honeycombed flesh of the worm-ridden corpse. It’s gray and pliant and the blind heads of the worms that burrow through the remains of her soft, liquefying tissue stare expectantly at her when they peek out through the roof of their new home. She can still paint.

Layer after layer of paint is applied to the canvas, each yielding up a different tortured image. Years and decades of misery and doubt are poured into the fabric, and through all of it there’s that sky, that heat-shimmering sky that barely shows any blue, choked with the dust that preludes the sandstorms that hammer on the dome like the fists of a heathen god.

A thousand paintings and one. So many ideas is she attempting to express there, that she can find no word sufficient to express the horror of what drips down into the canvas, what has engraved itself upon her tunneled bones. Only the worms know the full text of the lament of her heart. The worms keep her secrets, but only so they can have more to devour. They are greedy things, with no appreciation for the fact that everything comes to them in the end.

(Perhaps, one day, even the memory of this time will be naught but worm food. She is not optimistic—some horrors come to be graven on the very foundations of the earth, and will not scrub out no matter what pressure you bring to bear. But she can have hope. Hope is all she has.)

It’s done. It took longer than Roswitha ever thought it would, and her soft and brittle fingernails are caked with a morass of paint that long ago turned muddy brown, but it is done. The screams of her heart, poured out into the world for all to see. She has stripped herself naked, of clothes and of skin, and now all the galaxy can gawk at the entrails.

She can’t see the painting. There’s too much blood spilled on the canvas.

Roswitha is young and whole again, her skin supple and her muscles taut, her hair pale gold without the dull decay of dishwater gray. She barely registers this before realizing that she is naked, and trapped in a dark, metal-walled room whose only light is a skylight opening out on a dull, bronze-blue sky that shimmers with heat.

She has never been here before, never been cast down into this particular oubliette, but all the same her heart begins to pound in panic, her breath catching in her throat. Sweat dribbles down her forehead, makes her hair cling to her neck. There’s a vicious, stinging pain in her arms and legs that brings Roswitha to her knees. She looks and there they are, the markings of the clan that vanished long ago into obscurity and dust, branded on her skin, still glowing red with the remembered heat of the branding iron. Roswitha tries to scream, but her throat’s bereft of air, and as the room grows hotter and hotter, at last she begins to understand.

She brings her fists down on the unyielding metal wall like hammers, but no one answers. She beats the unfeeling wall even as it begins to glow an incandescent orange and her skin comes away burned. Her flesh steams, little wisps of smoke trailing up from cracked skin. Then it sizzles. Then it bubbles, and as it begins to melt away from her bones and drop in greasy gobs of fat and tissue to puddle on the floor, at last she finds her voice.

The strangest thing of all of it, the thing that really _breaks_ her, is that she somehow manages to say two things at once.

_“I renounce, I renounce!”_

_“No, I will never—“_

But once you are in the oubliette, there is no hope of escape, there is no reprieve, and in the furnace there is only—

It was the cracking clink of glass on a hard floor, and the spray of liquid on her hand and face, that woke her.

Roswitha came awake in the slow, inching way she’d come awake the last time she had been sedated and she had to groggily shake off the artificial drowsiness the drugs provided her. She was slumped over in the armchair in her living room, a cracked glass still rolling gently on the floor and a smooth, amber puddle of liquor sparkling in the dim light cast by her lamp. All was silent. Even the beating of her heart seemed muted. It was as if the city was holding its breath.

Roswitha stood up out of the chair, meaning to go for a towel to clean up the mess, but one sight of her face in the spilled liquor had her groping for the lamp again, and when the apartment was plunged in darkness, she breathed again.


End file.
